SERBS ARE VICTIMS OF THE BIG LIE

For years I have savored Jeff MacNelly's sarcastic iconoclasm and found until now that his targets-"personalities" and political types-got just what they asked for. But his New Year's day cartoon (depicting Serbs and Soviet Communists as pigs gazing lovingly at each other from outhouse pits) demonized a whole people, the Serbs, reaching a scurrility previously achieved in 1848 against victims of the Irish potato famine by Punch, in Hitler Germany's anti-Semitic cartoons or in the anti-Catholic and anti-black works of Thomas Nast.

In its coverage of the Yugoslav crisis, the Tribune has been a leader in disinforming the American public. Your coverage has been a journalistic pogrom, a lynch mob, a rape gang. I defy you to follow up the stories on the "death camps, the rape camps," the destruction of Dubrovnik. These stories are fakes. Eventually you will have to eat your words.

I went to Dubrovnik on March 25, 1992; the Old City is only minimally damaged except for the library of the Serb Orthodox Church there, which is gutted. Your R. C. Longworth, when I offered to show him my video tapes, blustered "that contradicts our information." Your "information" is disinformation.

The shooting would never have broken out if Serbs too had been given self-determination. Serbs do not wish to live in Comrade General Tudjman's neo-fascist Croatia, nor in Izetbegovic's Islamic dream state. Before this war Serbs inhabited over 60 percent of Bosnia, but the Tribune and other practitioners of the Big Lie incessantly repeat that Serbs have "seized the land from the majority Muslims."

Muslims are town dwellers, Serbs are mostly farmers, hence "occupy" more territory. Have you really never heard about the relative population density of farmers and city folk?

Before 1941, Serbs were the majority in Bosnia and a third of the population in Croatia. "Ethnic cleansing" was started again against the Serbs of Tito Croatia right after the election of the Tudjman government and 50 years after the first "independent Croatia" killed a million Serbs.

Ethnic cleansing has been practiced against them in the Serbian province Kosovo, where Mussolini's Albanian pandours in World War II and Josip Broz in the Cold War ran the Serbs down from 50 percent to 10 percent of the population. That's ethnic cleansing.

The old bigot Nast at least had the honesty to label both of the races, blacks and Irish, that he detested, while MacNelly lacks the courage to abuse the Russian nation, saving his thunder for a little, brave people who are being ganged up on by a sleazy gang indeed. MacNelly's swine are an even match to the work of Goebbels' man Eberhard Taubert: He made that film showing Jews as rats descending into a sewer.